This repository contains the source for building the nlp.cs.utah.edu website. The website is constructed using jekyll by populating a collection of templates with data.

How to use it?

Almost markdown and plain text

This website is built using jekll framework. To use this website, you only need to know some markdown usage(https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet), or if you want, mathjax is added for it to support latex research or review writing.

If there are issues, etc, please create a github issue.

Directory structure

Here's a high level overview of the important files and directories that are used for constructing the website.

Internal components and templates

• config.yml: The configuration file listing jekyll options

• _plugins: Any ruby code that can be used to define jekyll plugins and generally construct website elements

• _layouts: The HTML layouts defined with the liquid templating language

• _includes: Snippets of HTML that can be included within markdown pages or in layouts. Two files that may need to be occasionally updated are:

  • _includes/nav.html: The contents of the navbar at the top of all pages
  • _includes/footer.html: The footer at the bottom of all pages

• _data: Structured data that is used to construct website elements. This includes information about people, papers, courses, datasets etc. The contents of this folder will be most frequently updated.

External facing elements

• img: Any images that are used in the site

• assets: Where CSS and Javascript code for the website is stored. (The current instance of the website is built with Bootstrap

• index.md: The home of the website, corresponding to https://nlp.cs.utah.edu.

• publications/index.md: The publications page of the website, corresponding to https://nlp.cs.utah.edu/publications. All the details about publications are obtained from the bib files in _data/bibs. Any paper pdfs will be canonically stored in publications/pdfs.

• people/index.md: The people page of the website, corresponding to https://nlp.cs.utah.edu/people. The details about people are obtained from _data/people (details below).

• courses/index.md: The courses page of the website, corresponding to https://nlp.cs.utah.edu/courses.

• datasets/index.md: The datasets page of the website, corresponding to https://nlp.cs.utah.edu/datasets.

Deploy

The website is hosted on the CS department server. To deploy, run the following on the command line:

bash publish.sh [your-cs-shell-id]

Data Description

The data for populating templates is in the directory _data. Its contents are:

_data/people

All the people affiliated with the group. This contains the following files:

• faculty.yml
• grads.yml
• undergrads.yml
• alumni.yml

Each file contains a list of people, each with the following fields:

• key: A sitewide unique identifier for the person. This identifier is used to refer to this person across the website.
• first_name: The first name
• last_name: The last name
• website: The person's website. If not provided, then a webpage for this person is created at nlp.cs.utah.edu/people/<key>, where <key> is the person's identifier from above.
• email: The email address
• photo: A link to a photograph of this person. If not provided then this points to /img/unknown.jpg. For profile photo, please manually rescale to roughly 250x320.
• research_interests: A short description or a comma separated list of research interests for this person
• degree: For students only. What degree are they working towards.
• advisor: For students only. Who is the advisor. Currently, this can be one of svivek or riloff.
• thesis: For alumni. If this person wrote a thesis, then the title of the thesis.
• thesis_url: For alumni. If this person wrote a thesis, then a pointer to the thesis document.
• first_position: For alumni. The first position after graduation.
• current_position: For alumni. Where are they currently?
• graduated_year: For alumni. When did this person graduate?

Among these fields, only the key and name fields are required. All other fields can be empty.

_data/bibs

Contains all publications in .bib files. Any bib entry in any .bib file in this directory will show up in on [[https://nlp.cs.utah.edu/publications]]. The bib entries are grouped by year for convenience.

The bib entries are standard bibtex, with two required and one optional extra field:

• tags: A comma separated list of tags
• paper: A pointer to the pdf of the file. The convention is that all pdfs are placed in the publications/pdfs directory, and this entry looks like pdfs/filename.pdf.
• award (optional): Any extra information about the paper identifying awards or recognition that it got. This will highlighted on the website.

There is a helper script _scripts/check_bibs.rb that can help validate the bib entries. To use it, run ruby check_bibs.rb. It will show any errors in the bib files.

_data/seminars

currently not shown on the website

We use the following data structure to organize our seminar info. Most recent seminar information will be shown on the front page of our website.

• key: just like the key for a publication, this is a key for a talk, tutorial, presentation. A /seminars/<key>.pdf according to the talk also suggested to put into the corresponding path.
• title: The title of the talk, seminar presentation.
• presenter: The name of the presenter, in future, we can post our nlp, ml seminar talk info here to attract other people to attend.
• from_org: The organization of the presenter.
• year: An integer value for the year value
• month: An integer value for the month value
• day: An interger value for the day value
• time: formated as 11:50AM - 01:10PM¬
• address: A string, such as MEB 3147¬
• keynote: The path to the keynote file , /seminars/<key>.pdf
• abstract: A brief and attractive abstract

softwares,data, semi-structured entities

currently not shown on the website

Besides the above entities are managed with yml data files, all other information such as news , research blog post, software , data, and course, usually they contain various rich information, and not easily formated into a unified structure. Especially for software and data, we encourage to use more rich form, such as jekyll post or some external wiki page. Hence, we offer a simple set of data fields, only when those data fields can be joined with our people and publications data.

It has a structured data template in _data\softwares. The fields for structured part in our system are as follows:

• key : the key of the software, such as CoreNLP
• titile: such as "Stanford NLP", a name for the software.
• url: The url of the software, it can be some post page in our system, or any existed project wiki page on github.
• about: A brief description for the software
• paper: related papers when citing for the software.

For others, we also propose the same policy as softwares, we can either create a post for them or just use the external pages.

"_posts" for all content entities, especially for news, or any page with rich request

"news", "courses", and the previous software and data components, will benefit from rich unstructured informations. We use the same "_post" features in jekyll as a unified framework to support all the concent , by organized by their post.categories as news, courses,software , data or any research blog topic categories.

Compiling and testing

To compile the project, you need jekyll on your machine. See the official jekyll website to see how to install it. With jekyll in place, you can compile and test locally by running (in the root directory of the project):

jekyll serve

This will compile the project and launch a local web server where you can browse through the generated website.

Contribution Guidlines

To be updated

Comments and Issues for Each part

Previously, with Tao, Tianyu, Annie, we have some brain-storm on this website, also collect some feedback from Ellen and Vivek. All the the previous ideas are listed in the following list with their current status and future plans.

Courses

Add our seminars.
"Other possibly useful courses" could have data mining? narratives? Basically, it will tell potential graduate students we have nice courses here :)

Yes. Still needs volumnteers to add those data. And we also support the seminar in our website, we keep use that to share our seminar information with others

Common Issues

1. invalid yml format

jekyll 3.6.0 | Error:  no implicit conversion of String into Integer

Keep in mind that, yml is wired format, which require a space after the colon ":".